Anthony Paul

“Like the architects of the fifteenth-century Spanish Inquisition and the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (cleanliness of blood), causing Jews from Spain and Portugal to flee to the Caribbean, the Code Noir defines Jews and conversos of Jewish descent as beyond saving. The logics of anti-Semitism and antiblack racism, seemingly differentiated by religious and secular discourses, converge in the political philosophy of white supremacy and the disposition of bad faith.”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage

“In this respect, to convert is to locate oneself in a particular temporality and duration. This duration is that of the inexhaustible future constituted by the infinite, the time of eternity, the time that inaugurates divine existence and its extension in the redemption of the body; thus its final point of completion—if there is one—is the parousia.”
― Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony

“Longing is the call of ney to ney to restore the direction broken by the horses’ hooves in a military campaign. It is an intermittent ailment, neither contagious nor lethal, even when it takes the form of an epidemic. It is an invitation to stay up late with the lonesome and an excuse not to be on equal footing with train passengers who know their own addresses well. It is the transparent fabric of that beautiful nothingness, gathered to roast the coffee of wakefulness for the dreams of strangers.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“Who were the first persons to get the unusual idea that being free was not only a value to be cherished but the most important thing that someone could possess? The answer, in a word: slaves. Freedom began its career as a social value in the desperate yearning of the slave to negate what, for him or her, and for nonslaves, was a peculiarly inhuman condition. —Orlando Patterson, Freedom”
― Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage